If you’ve read my monthly Forecasts over the years, you may have periodically noticed that sometimes I’ll describe days in which “nothing is happening,” and you may have wondered what use you could possibly make of information like that. These are days in which no planet is connecting with any other. That’s a very unusual kind of day, because the Moon moves through the zodiac quite quickly, completing all 12 signs in its monthly round and connecting with most of the other planets as it moves through each sign. So there are only a few days like this a year. But it’s connected to another phenomenon that’s more frequent, which is called the Void-of-Course Moon.
The Moon takes about 2 and a half days to pass through each zodiac sign. When the Moon has made the last aspect (connection) that it’s going to make in a given sign, it is said to go “void of course,” which basically means that there are no more connections due to happen in the Moon’s upcoming path. After the Moon changes signs, it’s like hitting a reset button and the Moon enters a new “course” which is not “void” until it again finishes the final connection it’s going to make with another planet while in that sign.
So if, for example, the Moon is in Capricorn and squares Saturn at 2:42 in the afternoon and trines Jupiter at 6:05 that evening, and leaves Capricorn at 9:22 that night, it will be said to be void-of-course between 6:05 (when it made its last aspect, which was to Jupiter) and 9:22 (when it left Capricorn and entered Aquarius). The period of time that the Moon can be void-of-course varies—it can be for just a few minutes or a whole day (although that’s rare).
So those rare days I’ve been describing in my Forecast pages as days when “the Moon makes no exact aspects” tend to have an eerie feeling, almost a feeling of suspense. It’s hard to know how to respond to anything on these days, and making decisions is about as bad an idea as it is during Mercury retrograde, and for similar reasons.
Not all these “no aspect” days are also void-of-course days, because it’s possible for the Moon’s course to have a sort of dead patch in the middle, followed by more planetary connections, followed by a real void period at the end. But when a “no aspect” day is also a void-of-course day, the effect is intensified.
While the Moon is void-of-course you may not know what you feel and your intuition may be off, so you may decide later that your decision was faulty. Astrologers have a catchphrase for what happens during the void-of-course Moon: “nothing will come of the matter.” One astrologer made use of this characteristic of the void Moon, with rather famous results.
You may know that Astrologer Joan Quigley was hired by President Ronald and Nancy Reagan to help set dates for meetings and other things during Reagan’s presidency. According to Wikipedia, Nancy hired Joan after the assassination attempt on the president, because Joan said she could have predicted that event. What you may not know is that Joan’s astrological help is probably the reason why Reagan came to be known as the “Teflon President.” Joan advised the Reagans about when to hold press conferences, scheduling them during void-of-course Moon periods so that “nothing would come of the matter.” So, no matter what difficult questions the press threw at Reagan, he was able to smooth things over. Nothing ever happened that seemed important enough to report on or to question in the press, and no ugly smear campaigns or rumors ever resulted. Nothing stuck to Reagan—and thus he was Teflon.
The Moon void-of-course is a powerful time, even though it’s also a “dead” time. So the conclusion that we must come to is that during a void-of-course Moon you have two choices: 1) take a load off and don’t make any important decisions or 2) call a press conference you don’t want negative repercussions from. And that’s what to do with a void-of-course Moon!
